Unitarian Church of Evanston IL Spied Upon by Army Intelligence

In doing some research into the history of the Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois during the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the opposition to the war in Vietnam, I have come across a little known and courageous moment in American history. It is a moment that touches three distinct eras of my own life.

It is the story of the former Army Intelligence Officer who came to the site of the Unitarian Church he had once been ordered to conduct surveillance upon in order to confess. He came to confess his complicity in what he came to believe was a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America… to which he had sworn an oath.

His name was John O’Brien. I have been able to find out little about him, other than that he testified before Congress about the U.S. Army’s surveillance activities against subversive organizations. He had apparently been an Army Intelligence Officer in Europe before being brought back to the U.S. to be a part of the Evanston Illinois Army Intelligence Office that monitored the churches and other organizations in the area. In the transcript of the sermon and then forum-speech he gave on Sunday, May 9th, 1971, he speaks of having been involved in collecting intelligence on several Illinois figures, including Rev. Jesse Jackson and Adlai Stevenson (Unitarian who later ran for President).

In his amazing sermon and speech, he talks quite candidly about the operation in Evanston and Illinois, and even mentions that some of what he is speaking of was classified and that he expected he might get a visit from the FBI in the coming days. He speaks of his initial briefing in the area, held on the street in front of the Unitarian Church, which was pointed out to him as one of the hotbeds of radical activity, not just because the church members were radicals, but because the church allowed many other groups to meet there.

I got the sense in reading his words that he was not a very liberal man, and certainly was not a “60’s radical”. He was a man of conscience who saw the reality of the Army generic sumatriptan price investigating American citizens, a reality that he could not reconcile with the oath he took to “support and defend the Constitution”.

I am a former Army Intelligence Analyst, and my wife is a former Army Counter-Intelligence Agent. Our reading of these pieces is that it is in line with what we were taught about that time, and that the document seems valid. In truth, as I was reading it I came to the belief that what he said that morning might even have constituted a felony for a former Intelligence Officer.

What I have not before shared is that my father was a part of the same operation… the same program of surveillance and monitoring of domestic dissidents during the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement. Instead of Illinois, my father was assigned to offices in California… in Berkley and in Los Angeles. I grew up with the stories of that time, from the perspective of the agents, not the dissidents.

Now, in the church that was once considered a hotbed of radical activity and a threat to the security of the U.S. Army, I completed my ministerial internship to become a U.S. Army Chaplain. Now I am a Candidate for the Ministry of the faith that my father and his colleagues felt was such a threat. Now, I have the privilege to see the courage of a man who my father probably knew (and despised). I have the privilege to know that John O’Brien shared the same pulpit (metaphorically, not literally) that I spent a year preaching from.

What all of this means, I cannot say. But I can say this… our lives are all connected, even beyond the bounds of time. When John O’Brien spoke that day before committing himself to a self-enforced silence for the sake of his family, could he have known that his words would have a profound effect, 37 years later, on the son of a colleague studying for this dangerously radical ministry so he could return to the Army to take care of soldiers?

What an amazingly Interdependent World we live in…

Yours in Faith,

David